Tendem
Mini toolsInstructGPT
By OpenAI
Text
Gen 2
Overview
InstructGPT is OpenAI’s instruction-tuned GPT-3 line. It learns to follow natural language instructions using human feedback, which makes answers more helpful, safer, and on task compared with base GPT-3.
Description
InstructGPT takes a pretrained GPT-3 model and aligns it to user intent with a human-in-the-loop process. First it is fine-tuned on examples where humans demonstrate ideal responses, then a reward model is trained from human preference comparisons, and finally the model is optimized with reinforcement learning from human feedback so it prefers helpful, honest, and harmless answers. This shift from next-token prediction to instruction following reduces off-topic rambling, toxic outputs, and refusal mistakes, while improving step-by-step explanations and compliance with formatting requests. It laid the groundwork for later systems such as ChatGPT and the GPT-4 family by proving that preference data and careful alignment can produce models that feel cooperative and reliable in real use. Limitations remain, including sensitivity to annotator bias, occasional over-caution, and the need for clear prompts, but InstructGPT established the modern recipe for practical instruction-following LLMs.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is a technology company that specializes in artificial intelligence research and innovation.
Industry:
Research Services
Company Size:
5000-5500
Location:
San Francisco, California, US
Website:
openai.com
Last updated: October 14, 2025
